Authors: George V. Higgins
“ ‘Now I figure,’ he tells me,” Farrier said, “ ‘I sit down and I think about it, and the one thing that occurs to me right off when I start thinkin’, is, “Okay, if I’m gonna make the kind of money that I need, kind that I have got in mind, which is a lot of fuckin’ money, there’s no doubt that I’m gonna hafta do some things that aren’t gonna always be strictly by the book. I mean, I’m not gonna be a doctor; never gonna run a bank. No one’s comin’ up to me some fine day when the sun’s out, and sayin’ to me, ‘Well, don’t
you
look like a good smart kid—bet your momma’s proud of you. Here’s a couple good-sized oil wells, see what you can do with them.’ I’m gonna have to know how to take care of myself and then I’m gonna need somebody who can show me what to do.” ’
“The thing that people never seem to realize about these guys,” Farrier said, “is that the ones who really make a mark for themselves in the underworld, start from scratch, and rise up through the ranks until they get to the very top, or damn close to it, and then
stay
there,
and
stay
alive
, until the day that they retire, is that the
ways
they do it, strategy and tactics, ’re very similar to the ways that ambitious honest young guys make their marks in the legit business world. Or in the government. Gain position, they’re still young, any way they have to do it. Build on it as they get older. Make alliances and break them, and surround themselves with friends. I don’t think the Harvard B School has a Mafia professorship, and I doubt anyone who’s
qualified’d be interested in an offer—couldn’t take the cut in pay, much less pay taxes on his earnings. But in the abstract there’s no reason why the chair could not exist; there’s sure enough case histories, lots of problems still to solve as these guys change with the times.
“First of all, Nick finished high school and did not wait for the draft. ‘You stayed in school because back then the diploma was your ticket to a good assignment.’ As I also knew, of course. ‘Then you enlisted, before they drafted you—got to pick your branch the service, the speciality you had in mind. So I did that.’
“What he did was navy, UDT—underwater demolition team. Became an expert in explosives. Also in commando tactics, sneaking in and creeping up on people, killing silently or making lots of noise and taking people by surprise so that by the time their friends reacted, he’d done what he came to do and gone away again. He was very good at it. Won himself two bronze stars and a fistful of citations. ‘Not an easy thing to do—medals
meant
something in those days—when the point of what you’re doing is to do it secretly, so that nobody finds out.’ Told me that himself. ‘That’s why I’m the Frogman, just in case you think I’m just a piece of shit who doesn’t love his country.’
“The second thing he did was make the decision he would never touch a thing that didn’t feel right to him. ‘I can’t tell you how it is that I know when something doesn’t. It may look perfectly okay to anybody else, but to me not a thing to do. But I know, I always know. I can’t tell you how many times I said No, and shied away from something that looked prime. Sometimes I’ve been wrong, and missed out on a lot of money. But that’s always been all right with me. My rule’s always been that if I dropped out on four sure things, and everyone went in on them made a whole shitload of money, and I also passed on one cake-walk where it then turned out that everyone who went in went to jail, I was smarter’n all the guys went in on the other four.
“ ‘You, you’re still new in this town,’ Nickie said to me. ‘You been here what? A year or two. In this town that’s like you just blew in yesterday. You been
here
a little while, five or ten years, say, like Al DeMarco was, and you find out what’s goin’ on, you will meet a lot of guys who’ll tell you all kinds of things about me. I done this and I done that; I done the other thing. Sayin’ that I killed guys, even, put them in the hospital? Well, let me tell you what to do, somebody tells you that. You say to them, “Now is that so? He sounds like a real bad bastard. How come I run him through the files, I don’t find nothin’ on him? J. Edgar’s record and the Frogman’s are identical. One of those guys at least is smart. You don’t think—both of them?” ’
“And then he looked at me and smiled,” Farrier said. He drank some of his beer and Stoat, now morose, drained his second glass.
“So, all right, that’s all he told me. Now the question is, what’s he done? That we know about, at least, even though we can’t prove it?
“When he came out of the service, he joined up with Hugo Botto. Hugo Bottalico of the South End, North Dorchester and Roxbury, parts of Rozzie and JP—before the blacks moved in.”
Stoat shrugged. “Means nothing to me,” he said.
“Didn’t to me, either,” Farrier said. “Fogarty filled me in.”
The door chimes played “Dixie” again.
“I’
M
STILL
LEARNING
HERE
,
OF
COURSE
,” Stoat said, addressing McKeach as he reached over Farrier’s right shoulder, first placing his knife and fork securely on his plate amid the chicken bones and tomato sauce, then lifting it deftly off the beige woven-reed place mat and placing it onto the pass-through counter next to McKeach’s. “Seems like I should be up to speed by now, I know, been up here two years in May, but you guys and your competition committed a lot of history around here before I came on the scene.”
He moved behind Cistaro and cleared his place, putting the knife and fork in his left hand and taking the plate in his right, bridging it across McKeach’s and Farrier’s plates. Then he put Cistaro’s utensils with his own on his plate and, turning, lifted it onto the counter next to the two empty bottles of Chianti Classico Riserva.
“You know, you’re pretty good at that,” Cistaro said, talking to Stoat’s back, tilting his chair and grinning mischievously at McKeach and Farrier. Farrier, lifting his glass, raised his right eyebrow. McKeach showed watchful disapproval.
“At what?” Stoat said, in the kitchen now, sponging the plates
and loading them into the dishwasher, turning on the coffee maker.
“Waitin’ table,” Cistaro said. “Looked good with the wine too, openin’ an’ pourin’ that. Like you knew what you’re doin’—very smooth an’
professional.
Anything ever goes wrong with your day job, too much crime on your shift or something, you could fall back on the restaurant business. Be glad to call Marv Scotti, put a good word in for yah.”
“Who’s Marv Scotti?” Stoat said. “Never heard of him. See, there’s another one I don’t know—you know who he is, Jack? Is he anyone I should’ve?”
“
Sure
,” Farrier said, looking at Cistaro as he elongated the word, surprised amusement on his face. “I know who he is. Been here as long as I have, get to know most of the players. But I wouldn’t say
you
should—be more concerned, you
had.
Wonder maybe you’d been waitin’ ’til after I go home nights; goin’ out by yourself without supervision, havin’ me along—hangin’ out with the wrong type of guys.”
“
Hey
,” Cistaro said, “what kind to talk is that, now, ‘wrong typah guys’? Marv Scotti’s an upfront guy, perfectly respectable businessman.”
“Okay,” Farrier said, “we’ll have it both ways—Marvy Marv’s a respectable businessman, just the kind that only comes out at night. Places he runs’re perfect for lunch after seein’ your parole officer; go for drinks and dinner after an exhaustin’ day takin’ the Fifth before the grand jury.”
“Well, nights’re when he
works
,” Cistaro said. “That’s when his clubs’re open.”
“ ‘Clubs,’ ” Farrier said.
“Yeah,
clubs
,” Cistaro said. “He must own at least a dozen bars and restaurants. They got entertainment?
I
would call them
clubs.
“Pretty fancy places, too, Darren—get in lotsa the big tippers. Getcha night shift, one of those joints, all the moves that you’ve got, you’d do all right. Might do even
better
, in fact, you forgot about payin’ taxes onna tips, ’n you do workin’ now for Uncle Sam.”
“Got too much mouth on you sometimes, Nick,” McKeach said, his eyes narrow and dead.
“Take it easy, Arthur,” Cistaro said, showing irritation. “I’m just havin’ some fun here.”
“Jeez, Nick,
that
many?” Farrier said, eyebrows raised and amusement on his face. “He’s got a
dozen
joints? I didn’t realize Marvy Marv had access to that much capital—you and he’d gotten that close.”
“Uh
huh
,” McKeach said; he nodded once, his eyes glowing anger.
“Well, you know,” Cistaro said. “Where he gets his money—that of course I wouldn’t know. But I get around, you know? And he’s the type of guy that also gets around—so I see him now and then. Tells me about various problems he’s been havin’, some guy he thinks maybe I can help him out with. But who backs him? I dunno. That I do not ask him, and I therefore couldn’t tell you.”
“
Course
you could,” Farrier said. “And now I know too. You been
keepin
’ things from me, Nick. I knew he had a piece, of course, the usual ten- or fifteen-point slice the owners give their managers, the guys who run the places. So they’ll be on the owners’ side and won’t let the rest of the help steal ’em blind. In maybe one or two—in the Terrace out on Soldier Field, Beacon Tap in Brookline sure, he probably had a bigger interest. But those aren’t what I’d call your fancy
joints
, exactly—and I had no
idea
, a
dozen
? You must really trust the guy. How long’ve you and Marv been runnin’?”
“
Hey
,” Cistaro said, “quit bustin’ my chops, all right, willya? I’m just trynah give my friend Darren here a hint, you know? Some the contacts that we got, things we could do for him, day ever came he could use a little help.”
“I could use some of that,” Stoat said, putting mugs on the pass-through counter. “That’s why, Jack, what I was asking you there, history of what happened here, ten and twenty years ago. Made things the way they are now.”
He opened the refrigerator, talking into it. “The definite sense that I’ve been getting here is that this area’s atypical, if it’s LCN activity that you’re talking about. I don’t find the patterns I’d been told to expect. In other cities the mob’s been well established and entrenched since the twenties, Prohibition at the latest—it’s more or less a monolith, monopoly arrangement.”
He paused and closed the refrigerator but remained facing the counter next to it. He shook his head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, recalling his train of thought. “Didn’t used to have it here, any great extent, at least. Mob came in quite recently, big-time anyway, after the Korean War.”
“Well, it is atypical,” Farrier said, gazing at Stoat’s narrow back and shaking his head slightly. “That’s what I’ve been telling you, ever since you first came up here—we started getting you embarked on this whole thing here.” He looked at Cistaro and smiled.
Stoat, looking troubled, turned away from the counter next to the refrigerator and put a small pewter pitcher on the pass-through counter. Next to it he put a small pewter bowl with a small spoon in it, and placed four teaspoons between those pieces and the four mugs. He began pouring coffee into the mugs.
“Well, what you said about it so far, you’ve got it about right,” Cistaro said. “The basic thing you
had
here, used to have here,
there really wasn’t any well-established Mafia. Like in other cities like, say, New York. When we were all growing up. I’m not saying that you didn’t have your basic Mafia organization here, because you did. But it was small, the LCN—not that people called it that. They called it anything it was ‘the Mafia.’ Or ‘the Mob.’ Most people called it ‘the Mob.’ But no, back then it wasn’t something everybody knew was
here
—like a
bank
, or the
church
or something. That you just didn’t have. Things were much more fluid.” He nodded and said it again. “Fluid.”
“ ‘Fluid,’ ” Farrier said, grinning at Cistaro now.
“Well,
yeah
,” Cistaro said. “Take in my case for example. First got back here from the service, got discharged in fifty-four, October of that year. There wasn’t any bunch running things around here that you would’ve called ‘the Mob.’ Except in the North End—there just
wasn’t.
Oh, the organization was here, but it was small—a small beachhead.
“New York, you had the Five Families.” He shuddered. “There you
really
had it—they ruled the
world
, and I mean
everything.
”
McKeach stirred unhappily in his chair, moving his shoulders in the blue flannel shirt, hunching forward over the table, scuffing his fingernails on his place mat, frowning and working his mouth.
“You don’t agree, Arthur,” Farrier said. Stoat came around from the kitchen and put the creamer and sugar bowl at the center of the table.
“No, no, I don’t,” McKeach said, “but it’s not because … it just don’t make any
sense
to talk like that, bullshit kind of stuff.” He shook his head again.
Stoat put a mug of coffee at each place and sat down at the end of the table at the pass-through counter. “You,” McKeach said, squinting at him. “Someone like you comes in from down south, way out of town, and you’re here a year or two, and you
see you’re not gettin’ a grip on a thing. And you think, ‘Well, now, why don’t I know everything there is to know, how all these people here who lived their lives here’—and there’ve been a
lot
of us, over the course of the years. ‘Everything they did since World War Two’ is what you’re asking, stretch of time I’m talking. Over fifty years. That’s a lot of stuff to know.
“By now a lot of the players I knew’re dead. And you? You
can’t
, just by coming in here, find out everything they did. All you see now’s the results.” He paused and thought a moment. “I’m not coming at this right. It’s very complicated.
“Look,” he said to Stoat, “begin with you, all right? The reason I am sitting here, where I’m sitting now, and the reason you are sitting there, where you are now, and he”—looking at Farrier and indicating him with his right hand—“is where he is, and my friend Nick”—indicating him—“is where
he
is, and we’re all here together”—using his right hand to make a circling motion—“having a meal an’ talking? Just like ordinary people?